Hanging on to life, one agonizing step at a time

World War II veteran Rothacker C. Smith Jr. in his Pine Forge home in September 1999. He's shown with the shirt he was wearing when he was wounded in Sommocolonia, Italy.

World War II veteran Rothacker C. Smith Jr. in his Pine Forge home in September 1999. He's shown with the shirt he was wearing when he was wounded in Sommocolonia, Italy. (Morning Call file photo)

An interview by David VendittaOf The Morning Call

Rothacker C. Smith Jr. was born in Harlem and moved to Detroit with his family when he was 8. After high school, he attended Emmanuel Missionary College in Michigan to study agriculture, but ran out of money after his freshman year.

Returning to Detroit, he worked with a crew that cleared trees from power lines until he was drafted into the Army in February 1943.

I received basic training as a medic at Camp Stewart, Ga. Here, I began to learn what segregation and Jim Crow meant.

One example: I watched an ice cream truck deliver ice cream to the "colored" PX, which had three white employees. The delivery consisted of three pints of vanilla ice cream and 147 pints of chocolate ice cream.

After many transfers and reassignments, I was assigned to the 2nd Battalion Medical Section of the 366th Infantry Regiment.

In World War II, there were seven black infantry regiments. Six of them had white senior officers, most of whom were Southerners.

The 366th was the only black infantry regiment with no white officers. We were a political football, partially because of the War Department's official mandate that colored troops should not be committed to combat.

Black troops were not permitted to fight until August 1944. Our regiment arrived in Italy in April of that year. We were assigned guard duty at airfields, ammunition dumps, bomb dumps.

Because I was a medic, life was pleasant for me. I learned to speak Italian, after a fashion.

In September, our regiment began to assemble as a first step toward moving to the front. On Dec. 1, I was assigned as a medic with an infantry company in the small village of Sommocolonia in the mountains above the Serchio River valley.

From the back side of town, we could see the river winding through the valley. The other side faced a low hill beyond which were other hills and the Germans.

The night before we entered combat, we were attached to the 92nd Division. Gen. Almond made a speech to welcome us. He said he didn't ask for us and didn't want us; we had too many high-ranking colored officers.

Our assignment was to hold Sommocolonia, about 100 stone buildings on a hillside. The only level ground was the village square.

Every day we fired in the direction of the enemy at five minutes to noon and then went back to whatever activities might occupy our minds until almost sunset, when the Germans would fire at us for five minutes.

Their artillery was unable to bear on the town, so we were usually serenaded with mortar and small-arms fire. The mortars did little more than clean the ivy off the walls of some of the buildings.

About Dec. 15, I was assigned to a machine gun squad on the front side of town facing the Germans. Because I was an unarmed noncombatant, I was made the squad's cook. We were stationed in one of the stone houses that had been requisitioned from an Italian family.

On Dec. 25, the Germans wished us merry Christmas by shelling us intermittently all through the day, so much so that the mule train couldn't deliver our Christmas dinner until after sundown. We carefully put it aside to eat for breakfast, because we had already eaten supper.

The next day I got up before dawn and went to get a bucket of water at the town hydrant, so that I could wash the dishes and serve the roast turkey with mashed potatoes and all of the fixings. Mortars were hitting various places in town, and as I went, one hit the side of a building almost over my head.

I got the water and, returning to the house, placed the bucket over a fire in the fireplace. The mortar shelling intensified, and three of us in the room had our helmets on.

Our platoon sergeant was standing in front of a shuttered window, drinking water from a dipper. A private was standing near the fireplace. I was bending over to retrieve my aid kit pack from against the wall opposite the window.

A 120mm mortar shell hit the window, and the explosion sprayed into the room.

I felt as if a force slammed me against the wall. I could hear metal clang against my helmet. A piece of shrapnel hit my right cheek. A piece of glass embedded itself under my eye. Something made a cut on my earlobe.

Another piece hit my elbow and made my right hand useless for about three days. One piece entered my back near the right shoulder blade and traveled about 5 inches toward my spine. Four or five pieces, mostly parts of the tail fins, entered my upper leg just below the hip bone on my right side. There were other minor cuts.

The sergeant had some holes in his chest, a hole in his upper thigh that a 4 by 4 bandage did not cover, and the little finger on his right hand was hanging by a piece of skin.

The private had a small cut on the back of his head.

We could look out of the window that the mortar shell had opened for us and see German soldiers in the dawning light.

I had to bandage the sergeant, using my left hand and my teeth to tie the bandages. No one could dress my wounds.

Very soon we heard feet running past the door of our house -- a group of partisans in retreat. Then we heard voices speaking German.

Men were screaming, bullets were ricocheting and the rest of the squad members told us that they were going to try to make it out of the back of the building. I don't know how many of them made it.

The Germans placed a machine gun in front of our door, firing it into the town. They then advanced it, and then we could hear them winding up a field telephone and shouting over it. Every once in a while, they would kick the front door of our house and shout something, but they did not enter.

From the time I had gotten hit, I was trying to pray, trying to make things right between me and my maker.

I knew that if my wounds didn't kill me, or I didn't bleed to death, I would be shot by the Germans. We had been told that the Germans did not take black prisoners.

The Bible says that it is given to man once to die, and after that, the judgment. I was trying to get ready for that judgment.

What with the battle going on, trying to dress another man's wounds, and feeling my blood running down my arm and my legs, I was having a hard time concentrating on a conversation with Jesus. Also was the terrible feeling that I had been neglecting him by not having kept the channel between me and heaven open.

The sounds of the battle receded as the Germans took the whole village. A little later, we heard the sounds of the women and girls of the town being escorted toward the German rear. Every now and then our front door would be kicked or knocked upon, but no one entered the house that day.

I don't know how long it took, but I finally received from heaven the peace that comes when one gives himself completely into God's hands and asks him for forgiveness.

Then I wasn't afraid anymore.

But I did not want to suffer pain. I was still praying that our men would rally to drive the Germans back and rescue us, but I wasn't afraid to die, and, whatever happened, Jesus would be with me. We heard shelling from our own artillery. Two shots were directed onto our position.

I didn't know until more than 50 years later that one of our artillery spotters was in Sommocollonia that morning, directing the artillery fire.

I heard and felt one shell hit the upstairs of our house. Another exploded in the street just outside the front door. I told the sergeant, "This is it." But no more shells came near us. In a few minutes, a barrage of shells exploded a few hundred yards away.

I found out, 50 years later, that Lt. John Fox, the artillery spotter, had called for fire on his own position and died that morning. His coordinates to the gunners also killed more than 70 Germans.

On Dec. 26, the shelling stopped. All of the rest of that day and all night, we were alone.

We decided that we could not put up any kind of defense. The only weapons we had were hand grenades, and two of us would have to throw them left-handed. I convinced the others that we would die a much less painful death if we surrendered and let them shoot us against the wall in front of our house.

Every time I changed my position, the metal in my upper leg would hurt. This would make me grit my teeth, and that would open my earlobe cut and allow drops of blood to run down my face. By the next morning, the right side of my face was covered in caked blood. I had to dig my right eye open.

About 9 a.m., two German soldiers came in the front door and started down the hall toward the door of the room we were in. Just before they got to the door, I hollered, "Kamerad!" They both turned and ran.

In a few minutes, they came back with reinforcements. They shouted something in German. I asked, "Parla Italianno?" One did speak Italian, and so we were able to communicate.

They told us to come out with our hands up. We had to drag the sergeant between us, because his wounded leg had become so stiff that he could not walk. I was looking into the muzzles of five guns. I knew that in two minutes, I would be dead.

I was not afraid. I tried to smile, but half of my face could not bend. They told us to take the sergeant back, and then the two of us walked ahead with our hands up.

My back seemed almost to tingle, as I expected to feel a bullet crashing into my flesh.

I had on some heave-wool socks, but no shoes. My feet had swollen during the night, and I couldn't get my shoes on. Almost a half-inch of snow had fallen during the night, not enough to hide the dried blood of the bodies of some of my buddies who had been killed the day before.

By the evening of the 28th, the Germans managed to have captured 10 of us. I was told that we were going to walk about 7 kilometers. We ended up walking all night, more than 35 miles.

My body was numb from the waist down. I had been drinking water from mud puddles, horse troughs or any other source I could reach. At first, some of the guys took turns supporting me. Then the instruction came that if I could not make it on my own, I was to be shot and left beside the road.

At first I would concentrate on getting to the second telephone pole. I would concentrate on reaching two poles. After a little, I knew that I couldn't go two poles, so I would go to the next pole. After a while, the next pole was too far, so I began counting 15 steps. Every 15 steps I made a life-or-death decision. Then it was 10 steps. And then every five steps I would decide to live for five more steps.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I found a piece of hard candy in my pocket. I put it in my mouth, and it seemed as though someone had given me a full-course dinner.

I received enough strength to count five steps for the rest of the journey, which ended well after daybreak. That is how I became a prisoner of Nazi Germany.

I was liberated from Stalag 7A in Moosburg, Austria, by Gen. Patton's army on April 29, 1945.

Smith came home to Detroit and resumed his study of agriculture in hopes of being a farmer. But his Seventh-day Adventist Church called him to be a teacher, first at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala., where he happily managed the farm for two years. During his career, he earned five academic degrees. His last teaching job was at Pine Forge Academy, the church's boarding school in Douglass Township, Berks County, where he taught science for more than two decades. Now retired, he and his wife, Dorothy, live near the school. They have six children -- Barry, Marcia, Karen, Brian, Candace and Zanita - - and six grandchildren.